Ron Unz has been on a tear of late writing essays about 9/11 conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial and the evils of Judaism and the like.
A friend says:
One of the things that bothers me about the persons who are critical of Unz because of his series of articles attacking Jews in general and Israel in particular, is that with the exception of Shamir who tried to prove that the Communists who controlled the Soviet Union were not dominated by Jews, is the failure to factually attack him.
No one can effectively attack Toaff since he is really the first historian to go back to original sources since the whole idea of ritual sacrifice of Christian boys, or blood libel as we Jews refer to it. Instead once Toaff published in Italian, the entire Jewish community came down on him and he recanted.
Regarding the other things, it seems to me that they should either (1) be factually refuted or (2) shown that even if the particular facts he is citing are true, he has drawn conclusions from them that are not really supported by the facts.
I don’t know whether it was Cochran or one of his commentators who put the $25K casualty figure from the bombing Dresden, but David Irving’s figure is probably more accurate. It is probably wrong for Karlin (if that is who said it) to conclude that the bombing of Germany probably shortened the war and saved lives. It is very hard to consider the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg as anything other than terror bombings since they were for a largely civilian population to test incendiaries which created huge firestorms sucking all the oxygen out of underground shelters. The issue will never be decided. There is a continuous battle of historians and military strategists and tacticians about the effectiveness of bombing The U.S. dropped more tonnage on Vietnam than in all of WWII but that didn’t seem to make much difference Its questionable as to how much the bombing of Serbia did during that war. I have read some historians who dispute what Karlan said and that military production was never seriously impacted by the bombing and I do know that at least at first when Speer took over control, production went way up. The other issue, which no one wants to deal with, is that bombing of civilians played into Hitler’s hands that the Germans could expect no mercy from their conquerors so they best had fight to the end.
I think it would behoove one of these critics of what Unz has decided to publish on his website, a factual refutation. I assume that Unz would publish it, although who knows.
Gregory Cochran has never been a fan of Unz. Here are some comments from Cochran’s blog:
* You were right years ago, You could see Ron was clearly not playing with a full deck.
* He’s completely bonkers.
I once thought, in my more innocent days of speculating about Unz’s motives, that he was propelled by politics.
Well, obviously that can’t be right.
* Reading the comments to Unz’s essays, the enormous number of approximately literate responders who couldn’t get enuf of that stuff was disturbing to me personally. (I read Sailer first thing and then generally check out Unz.com to see if there is something interesting there). Unz’s face is over-the-top singular. Is there anything to be drawn from that fact/face that could be construed about the mind inside through reverse engineering?
* I’m worried Unz’s behavior will take out Sailer and some of the other interesting guys on the site. Razib’s decision to leave now seems very prudent.
* Anatoly Karlin: The individual bloggers/authors are firewalled from each other, there is no common editorial policy, and the likes of Wally aren’t going to appear on my comments threads. For example, how exactly is this supposed to impact negatively on Sailer (ostracized from handshakeworthy journalism anyway)? Will you stop commenting on my blog specifically because Ron published that article? …
Falsifiable prediction: Readership of the UR will continue growing steadily, and will be appreciably larger in a year’s time than now. (That’s bearing in mind that even current figures are at an all time high).
The hard right has a certain admiration for Israel as a “national” state they want to emulate, the anti-Muslim crowd likes it for obvious reasons, and the HBD/IQist wing has a ready and obvious answer for Jewish overrepresentation in all sorts of spheres. The main intellectual “cluster” from the right that propounds counter-Semitism comes via McDonald’s EGI theory. (Anglin et al. are funny but they are not intellectuals).
The Left are blank slatists, and many are anti-imperialists. So to be consistent, they need to be anti-Semitic almost by default.
Though if you say enough bad things about germans and consistently so you’ll come you could still be legitimately called a Germanophobe, and ergo with other nationalities. TBF I can reasonably be called a Lettophobe.
The main difference is ofc that anti-Semitism has been sacralized in the West as something uniquely bad and evil.
* It probably will grow but the question is why and what audience will it cater to. Their will still be some reputable writers there such as yourself but for the most part the articles are ridiculous diatribes at best and delusional rants at worst and the comment section goes down hill from there. The point I am making is average people aren’t just bad at understanding the complex reality around them, they have completely given up trying to have an open mind. All they do is look to confirm their crackpot ideas, and since Unz review is crackpot idea central it will continue to grow. Don’t confuse popularity with intellectual integrity. A brilliant lecture by a respected professor like John Hawks will get 1000 views on Youtube, Some drunkard who lights his balls on fire and jumps off a garage roof onto a card table is guaranteed ten million.
* Earlier, different words were used [than the Holocaust]. Here’s one from Chester Wilmot’s “The Struggle for Europe, 1952, concerning German fears of the Morgenthau Plan: “even those Germans who had not been corrupted by years of anti-Semitic propaganda knew they had no right to expect mercy from the rae that their own government had sought to destroy by persecution and pogrom in the most bestial campaign of genocide that Europe had ever known.” – 1952 Clearly a longer phrase than “holocaust”. Or Churchill, to his Foreign Secretary, 11th July 1944: ” There is no doubt that this [ persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory] is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and on of the leading races of Europe.” Positively long-winded.
* I remember reading a long time ago an article on Ron Unz’s blog called ‘Kahanism or nothing’ (can’t find it now). Basically, he said that because of Israel’s tenous position it would either have to expel all the Arabs or cease to exist, but this was a shame because it was quite a nice country.
That was during the 1990s or maybe early 2000s (I think, really have to check). According to his recent articles, he had already been alerted during the First Lebanon War to the satanic, uniquely murderous nature of the Jewish religion by reading one book. I therefore don’t think there’s too much point trying to reconstruct the timeline of his thoughts on the issue. It’s always been pretty obvious that that the main criteria for getting a blog on his ‘journal’ was being anti-Israel and/or anti-Jew. Not that no-one else was allowed, just that if that wasn’t your thing you had to be actually, y’know, smart and say interesting things whereas if that wasn’t your thing you could be any old schizo doltard. For example, Ron Unz himself, after experimenting with ‘Jews drink Christian blood’, seems to have plumped for the ‘Jews were behind Communism’ version of anti-semitism, but still hosts Israel Shamir who says the Holodmor was made up and some other unreconstructed Communists. None of this is really supposed to make sense outside of some vendetta he has against his father and his obsession with proving that Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews would be equally represented among Harvard summa cum laudes if they were just given a fair crack. I’m sure Steve Sailer can give you some more details about chronology if you can coax him to say anything on the subject /jk.
* Greg Cochran: The Western Allies did not massacre German civilians or POWs at the end of the war. It didn’t happen. Now when the Russians (and others) expelled he Germans from Prussia and eastern Europe, something like 12 million people, quite a few died. Estimates range from ~700,000 to 2.5 million. Dresden, about 25,000 killed. For the entire war, about 600,000 Germans were killed by bombing – but not after the war, during the war.
If war was too hard for the Germans, then maybe they shouldn’t have started it.
* Anatoly Karlin: The Allied bombings interrupted what had previously been a rapid secular rise in German armaments in mid-1943. After that time, German war production flatlined.
Moreover, an increasing share of German war production had to be devoted to AA, to safeguard their industry. It also increasingly de-motorized the German military, making it much less capable of the maneuver warfare it was so exceptionally capable at.
It is very likely that the Allied bombings significantly shortened the war and helped save 100,000’s lives of Soviet soldiers and civilians under Nazi occupation.
Truly the Allied bombing campaign was one of the most effectively altruistic actions of the 20th century, along with the atomic bombings of Japan.
* I have a question and would appreciate someone more knowledgeable than me answer it, or someone please point me to the literature. How did the Nazis dispose of the bodies? From what I understand there were no dead bodies found, at least not many. From 1942 to June 1945, say, 3 1/2 years, would be roughly 912 days. If over 5 milion people were murdered in that time, that is about 5,500 bodies every day 7 days a week for 3 1/2 years. Bodies don’t burn by themselves. How much fuel does it take to burn one body? Or what other means did they use? How can you kill that many people day after day and leave no trace? I mean the logistics, let alone the daily horror that the same men had to engage in day in day out. Is it physically and pyschologically possible to do this?
* Greg Cochran: You can burn a body using next to no fuel: see Spontaneous Human Combustion.
They also rot by themselves. Then there are pigs. Or we could talk bulldozers.
The logistics are trivial. The Mongols killed maybe 10% of the entire human race and I doubt if they often worked up a sweat.
Next stupid question?
Mammals can in fact burn. I knew this because of those cases of “spontaneous” human combustion ( which involve cigarettes), also cases of nomads out on the steppe that were known to cook an animal using its own fat as fuel, something they no longer teach young Nazis in school.
The new rule is that Nazis are welcome on the blog, but only if they have something interesting to say. Von Manstein or Pascual Jordan would pass, but none of the recent flock of idiots would.
* Didn’t our gentle host himself, Greg Cochran, use to say that nutty scientists have hundreds of bad ideas but still they may eventually come up with one brilliant discovery?
I say let Ron Unz research and write and rant all he wants because maybe one day he’ll stumble upon a great idea. Perhaps, ultimately his greatest achievement will be the completion of his humongous digital archive, a new library of Alexandria.
